This blog is primarily for announcements about F# and other research projects in which I'm participating, and will contain summaries of ongoing design discussions and links to related material and other sites on the web. Let's start with the fact that a preview release of F# version 1.0 is now available! The release announcement is below. 🙂

As hinted in earlier messages on this email list a new release of F# is now available from http://research.microsoft.com/downloads. I delayed making the announcement while some problems with the download were sorted out. Please contact me directly if there are problems.

Highlights in this release are

Object expressions and other enhancements to the language. See http://research.microsoft.com/projects/ilx/fsharp-manual-advanced.aspx#ObjectExpressions. This makes the language a CLS extender language with one exception - it is not yet possible to create objects that implement multiple unrelated interfaces - there are workarounds for this by using a C# helper class.

A preliminary version of a Microsoft Visual Studio package (currently requires VS 2005 Beta 1 and the matching VSIP SDK). This includes interactive syntax highlighting, parsing and typechecking, and a preliminary project system. Support for intellisense will be added at some point in the v1.0 release cycle.